With the steep rise in telecommuting and advances in video conferencing, many workers are neveror hardly everin a physical office. At San Felipe Development Company, a Baja California, Mexicobased real-estate firm with just over 40 employees, workers frequently find themselves in California offices, Mexican offices, or other locations. The company faced the tricky problem of centralizing its telephone system and voice mail, and found a solution, beginning in October 2003, in GotVMaila set of services offered by Newton, Massachusettsbased GotVMail Communications.

Typically, the heart of a large company's telephony and voice-messaging systems is a PBX (private branch exchange), which handles extensions, conference calls, call forwarding, and e-mail integration. Workers outside the office can call in to retrieve their voice mail, and incoming callers are seamlessly forwarded to remote locations through the PBX.

The problem for a small company, though, is that PBXs cost thousands of dollars, have ongoing upgrade costs, and require expertise to manage. Instead of issuing workers only cell-phone numbers and doing without a centralized system, San Felipe Development uses GotVMail as a virtual PBX.

"Getting lines transferred down to Mexico can be really expensive," says Brian Crumrine, founder of San Felipe Development, which develops and markets real estate under the name Mi Casa del Mar. "That's one reason we use GotVMail. We handle all our sales calls into Mexico with it. It serves as our phone presence in the U.S. People can go into their voice mailboxes while on the go, and they can get voice messages e-mailed to them down in Mexico."

Employees can choose to have fax and voice messages e-mailed to them as PDF or MP3 files. Calls coming in to the company's U.S.-based 800 number can be routed to cell phones that employees in Mexico carry, incurring only U.S.-based fees. Employees can use Voice over IP phones from Vonage or Skype for taking Internet calls. The service does not currently support SIP phones.

GotVMail operates data centers at several U.S. locations (using various carriers for calls) that route calls, messages, and e-mails. The company's network uses Oracle, NetAppliance, Cisco, and Dialogic hardware and software components, as well as a proprietary software suite.

San Felipe Development has both a standard U.S.-based number that GotVMail issued and a toll-free number. Any business can get numbers issued by GotVMail online at www.gotvmail.com and have a virtual PBX up and running instantly, but companies typically spend some time customizing the service. For example, some users may want voice mails forwarded by e-mail, and some may want to be reachable at more than one phone.

If you're an opponent of elevator music, GotVMail lets you upload your own tunes to play while customers are on hold. The service also lets you search for previous calls and export the search results in Microsoft Excel's XLS, PDF, or other formats. "We're really focused on managing the burgeoning inbound volume of calls," says GotVMail CEO Siamak Taghaddos, "whether the calls are going to cell, VoIP, or other phones."

Crumrine says that both cost savings and efficiency explain his company's use of GotVMail. "It saves us money in that we don't have to have the calls transferred down to Mexican landlines at maybe 60 cents a minute."

GotVMail's VirtualOne pricing plans are available with flat monthly fees. San Felipe Development uses the VirtualOne Premier plan, which costs $39.95 a month for 20 mailboxes (extra mailboxes cost $10 a month for each set of five). Calls cost 7.5 cents per minute, but the company can choose to buy minutes in volume1,000 minutesand reduce the per-minute fee to 4.5 cents.

Advanced telephony is without a doubt essential in business. Even without a centralized office or PBX, san felipe development's implementation is as sophisticated as a large company'sbut it's all virtual, and a lot cheaper.

Sebastian Rupley is Editorial Director for PCMagCast, PC Magazine's channel for live Web seminars and online events on tech topics for consumers and small businesses. Previously, he was West Coast Editor of PC Magazine for over a decade, where he oversaw news and feature stories for the publication, and represented the brand on panels and at conferences on the West Coast. He also served as Features Editor of PC/Computing magazine, managing and promoting many noted technology journalists.
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